Texas Tech doctor: Health care decision won't help rural towns

LUBBOCK — Except for Lubbock, Amarillo and the Midland-Odessa area, the far-flung communities of West Texas aren’t going to be helped by the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act, the president of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock said.

Dr. Tedd Mitchell said the upholding of the individual mandate portion of the legislation isn’t going to help everybody.

“There is a unique situation for West Texas and rural America that something like the Affordable Care Act doesn’t address. What everybody talks about with the Affordable Care Act is making sure that everybody has insurance coverage. And having insurance coverage in West Texas does not mean having access to care.

“The Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center’s catchment area for the state is 108 counties, which is 49 percent of the state’s geography,” Mitchell said. “So, our area of coverage out here that we’re responsible for is larger than 46 out of 50 states in the United States. We have 54 counties in West Texas that don’t have enough people living there to be considered rural. They’re still called frontier counties.

“So, having an insurance card for somebody in Loving County doesn’t guarantee them any access to health care at all, because we’ve got 32 of our counties in our area that don’t have a hospital.”

Dr. Paul Walter, chief medical officer of Covenant Medical Group, said his organization has been planning to implement various changes in health care reform as physicians join the Covenant Health Care System.

“It just means that we were anticipating the future and making plans in that direction, and we will continue doing that,” he said.

“We see a very interesting change in health care reform. We feel that we are preparing for it, and we will be quite ready to meet the challenges of the future and challenges of the Obamacare as it’s outlined for us going forward.”

Tony Jones, owner of Caprock Discount Drug, alludes to a bureaucratic factor possible in the affirmation of the legislation. “Any time the government gets involved in your business, it’s not going to be a really good thing for providers. Usually it’s more work with less reimbursement.

“We’re so regulated already, just for the regulations it’s going to further complicate everything from a health provider’s standpoint.”

Mitchell, referring to the immensity of this region, said, “It’s the distance; it’s the geography. One of the things that no piece of legislation can address is our geography.

“Our situation is no different than Wyoming, Kansas, Montana or the Dakotas,” Mitchell said. “So, for a lot of rural America, the situation with the Affordable Care Act ... while making sure everybody has an insurance card is a noble thing, it really doesn’t address our needs.”

The strategy the Lubbock medical community is to try to put in place technology to bridge the distances to one of the two level-one trauma centers across the region — one being University Medical Center, and the other the former Thomasson Medical Center in El Paso that now also goes by the name of University Medical Center.

“The way we are trying to address our geography is, in a figurative sense, to kind of shrink our geography. And we’re looking at things like telehealth, telemedicine. We actually have at Texas Tech one of the longest telemedicine programs that has been running in the nation,” Mitchell said.

“So, while the Affordable Care Act is something that will hopefully address needs of people in urban and suburban areas, it really doesn’t address the needs of rural America.